‘The Reformation’ by Owen Chadwick – A Book Review

Updated 15 November 2013

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Pope Benedict preaches forgiveness again, albeit centuries too late! Has anything really changed in the Catholic Church?

In the last year or so the Pope has forgiven Joan of Arc (possibly mistaken identity) Galileo, and Martin Luther, their alleged heresy against The Church.

See previous posts: Joan of Arc; &  Galileo’s Daughter

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THE REFORMATION by Owen Chadwick

– A Book Review

Martin Luther, a former Catholic priest, the Pope now says, did not intend to split the Catholic Church. Luther (1483-1546)  wanted to purge The Church of corruption.  The poor were forced to contribute to the Church’s coffers at Sunday Mass,  and starved, while the clergy grew fat on that income and the wealth given to them by the privileged in order that those who sinned (like paedophile priests) may take a short cut around penances for their mortal sins, and still get to heaven.  Luther preached that whether we go to either heaven or hell,  is preordained when we are born.  We cannot bribe our way into heaven.  This was Luther’s way of stopping the corruption of indulgences within the Catholic Church. Luther believed the Bible to be the sole source of religious authority and made the Bible accessible to the masses by translating it into the vernacular and arranging hundreds of copies to be printed; made possible by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

See previous post: Justification of Johann Gutenberg

The whole thing is rather sickening and hypocritical really. The move by the Pope is believed to be the Vatican PR Machine’s way of softening Pope Benedict’s image as arch conservative hardliner, ex-head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and pro nazi sympathiser during World War ll.  It is no secret that the Catholic Church supported Nazism.  The Pope is also erecting a statue in the Vatican gardens, to Galileo, another  “heretic” excommunicated by the Church, and who lived out his last years in poverty under house arrest.  His crime was his belief in heliocentrism: the planets and the earth revolve around a relatively stationary sun at the centre of the solar system.  I think the only reason Galileo wasn’t tortured to death by the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition was that he was much loved by the people and a brilliant scientist. Nevertheless Galileo was forever alienated from his church, the pope, and the Jesuits in particular.

Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.  Many thousands of the poor were tortured and killed in the purges that followed.  A brutal war erupted which divided Christendom; but it was not about religion, it was about POWER!  Nothing has changed in the 21st Century.

MERCY: St Bartholomew’s Day, Paris, 1572. ‘Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant’. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

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-Anne Frandi-Coory  15 November 2013